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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 29th, 2022

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  • Pretty sure the Californian authority is not a copper DSL religious cult. If you actually read the article, the regulations they are citing are built for vulnerable communities to protect them from for-profit utility providers from cutting them off by shutting down old but only available way to provide internet to the people.

    Wireless is not a fix-all solution, and can be unreliable and bandwidth limited for dense areas.

    This message is sent to you by someone whose utility provider decided to do exactly what you wish and now is stuck with wireless towers that completely go down if there’s any heightened usage (tourism, people moving in, and so on) or pretty much randomly (and since the infrastructure is not built yet, the company’s nearest branch is nowhere near me), if you move too quickly, go to a room the tower doesn’t properly reach (yes can be fixed, but now the burden of cost is on the person not the company), and many more issues that arise when ‘wireless towers’ are provided instead of actual internet cables that might be slower, older and more expensive for the provider but much more reliable, stable and actually working most of the time.



  • That’s silly, they really are not wasting anything. And even if they were, the prospect of effectively countering ad block and the growing network of alternative frontends in one blow is absolutely worth a shot. They have their numbers to test out server side ads, and worst case scenario for them is basically what they already have but much harder on the other side (makers and maintainers of adblockers and alternative frontends.)

    Corporate totalitarianism (and totalitarianism as a whole) doesn’t produce stability by absolute power over 100% of the population, it is stable by making it hard enough for any considerable and/or effective portion of the population to be able to do anything about it.















  • It is not about “bragging” or whatever. Nor is it about “bad” or “good”.

    By funding or promoting the use of Google products, you would be funding litigation and influence such as lobbying to keep poor regulation as it is, if not worse. You would be funding their acquisitions of great tech and startups that might offer a more ethical and/or free technology. You would be funding their poaching of said engineers and valuable hardware intellectual property.

    Simply put, it is a counterproductive and an unsustainable practice.

    That being said, their amazing engineers, and technical value of their hardware are irrelevant to this community, post and comment. That simply doesn’t excuse their entire business model being built on breaches of privacy and other forms of curbing user freedoms.




  • I keep seeing this idea everywhere. Buy a Google phone and install another OS.

    It is completely absurd to fund the exact adversaries you are running away from, while consuming, without contributing a dime, merely a piece of free software. (It is only a small piece of freedom because none of the hardware is free, and some binary blobs [incl. potential backdoors] will still be present in the alternative OS no matter which one it is.)

    This is unsustainable, terrible, damaging advice. Stop giving it.